The Quest for the Truth of the Wavertree by Norman Brouwer Curator of Ships, South Street Seaport Museum
It was a brave act for Jakob /sbrandtsen and the trustees of the newly formed South Street Seaport Museum to take on the Cape Horn sailing ship Wavertree in 1968. But from the first the Museum had been dedicated to "real ships, with a real story to tel/;" And fired by this idea, staff and volunteers set to work with missionary zeal to get real artifacts and real records of the ship's passage through history. This quest for the truth of the ship and her sailing has been led and directed by National Society trustee Norman Brouwer, who here retraces some of the trail. It's a trail of many false leads-old ships seem to stir up fantasies in their wakes-but also one leading to the very real joys of real discovery. -ED In the late 1960s, when the South Street Seaport Museum in New York was in its first years, I lived in Washington DC and attended the George Washington University. In my spare time I did volunteer work for the National Maritime Historical Society, then headquartered in Washington, and I wrote on sailing ship news for the Journal of the Nautical Research Guild, including, in 1968, a list of square-rigged vessels existing around the world. One result of that was that I heard from the South Street Museum Program Director, Alan Frazer, of the Museum's acquisition of two historic square riggers-the wooden packet ship Charles Cooper of 1856, lying in the Falkland Islands, and the big iron square rigger Wavertree of 1885, in Buenos Aires. Graduating in June 1969, I decided not to go into the State Department, for which I had trained. Instead I took the opportunity to go back to sea, as mate of the Arctic research vessel Hero, based in Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan. Alan wrote me there asking if I would do some scouting for photographs or other evidences of the Wavertree's stay, when she had Jain off the town at anchor as a storage hulk, from 1911 to 1948. He was particularly interested in finding the ship's figurehead, apparently removed in this period. My first contact was the manager of the local paper, Oswaldo Wegmann. He had already provided Norma and Peter Stanford, then on the Museum staff, with a distant photo of the ship lying off the town, during their visit the year before. Senor Wegmann put me in touch with the local Cape Horn Club, who invited the Hero's captain and myself to one of their dinner meetings. The members were prominent Punta Arenas businessmen. Many remembered the ship, but none could provide any photos of her, and all agreed that there were no figureheads surviving locally. I also checked the local dealer in antiques and curios, named Fernandez. He had some fittings from unknown vessels in a yard behind his shop. He supplied me with three more photos of the harbor, each showing Wavertree in the distant background, and told me he had stripped the ship of her fittings before she was towed away to Argentina-but he could not identify these from among gear from other ships in his yard . He said he had removed the ship's figurehead, crated it, and shipped it to Pablo Neruda the poet (later a Nobel prize recipient), who had a considerable figurehead collection; but he said Neruda told him it was never received. Fernandez also claimed he had for a while owned a spyglass found in a sealed-up storeroom on the ship-and the storeroom had also contained a skeleton, purportedly that of a captain's wife murdered by her husband!* Coming back from our last Antarctic voyage in 1970, I learned from our Straits pilot of a second figurehead collection in Chile, *There was no murdered wife-but was there a shipment to Neruda? We don't know. ... -ED.
belonging to Martin Skalweit, a shipowner in Valdivia. In June Susie and I left Punta Arenas on a two-month trip north through South and Central America. In Valdivia, a quiet little city which had ceased to be important as a seaport, we learned that the old firm of Haverbeck & Skalweit had gone out of the shipowning business after losing three ships in the great Corral tidal wave of 1960, and Martin Skalweit was in Santiago. But when we reached that city, we could not raise him, nor could we reach Pablo Neruda, who was out of the country serving as ambassador to France. Two years passed before I again became involved in Wavertree research. I joined the South Street Seaport Museum staff on September 1, 1972 as Ship Historian, having in the meantime studied museology at Cooperstown, New York. In the four years since Wavertree was acquired a large body of material on the ship had been assembled, thanks to many hands: Karl Kortum of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, Andrew J. Nesdall of Massachusetts and Robert Weinstein of Los Angeles (who had grown up together scavenging old wrecks in New York harbor); Robert G. Herbert, Jr., of Long Island and the marine artist Oswald Brett also of Long Island, who had come to this country from Australia and involved his compatriot Alan Villiers in the Wavertree project; George Campbell of the American Museum of Natural History, who had designed the Cutty Sark restoration in England and simply walked in South Street's door one day to volunteer his considerable services; John Smith, keeper of a small Falkland Islands museum, and his predecessor Karl Lellman; Gordon Chapman, Cyril Hume and A.D. Edwardes of Australia; E.W. Paget-Tomlinson and Michael Stammers of Liverpool; square rig veterans Captain Archie Horka of New Jersey and Captain Fred Klebingat of Oregon, and Gustav Alexandersson in Sweden. The long-sought figurehead (detail enlarged) from a ship's portrait taken in San Francisco in the 1890s. Courtesy Nat'/ Maritime Museum, SF.